You responded to Ben’s comment about when you parted ways, but I’d be curious to know how you’d respond to the other point he brought up about various extreme-sounding statements Ziz has made that don’t seem to have been jokes, like “Don’t trust anyone over 30 with a kill count of 0” (about the anarchist transhumanist William Gillis, whose writing she had previously cited in a positive way) or various other examples of violent rhetoric in “A community warning about Ziz” (in the subsection titled ‘Statements by Ziz’).
It seems to me that your belief in her non-involvement in violence relies heavily on your assessment of her character, but I don’t think character is sufficient to predict violence or nonviolence, even “nice” people may be driven to violence if they adopt belief systems that justify it (especially among Rationalists who are known for taking ideas seriously). In particular you allude to the idea that she came to accept “the idea that any moral flaw was a sign of an event horizon signalling eventual total commitment to fractal defection”, but from what I gather this was more of a metaphysical belief than just a statement about psychology (not just something along the lines of bad choices leading to vicious cycles that make further bad choices more likely), one which could lead to a kind of dehumanizing attitude about those deemed metaphysically evil.
I read through her blog a while ago and took some notes—she often talked about every left/right brain hemisphere having a “core” which was something like a soul, and expressed a belief that every core was fundamentally aligned to either good or a binary alternative which she initially called “nongood” (to cover both ‘neutral’ and ‘evil’ according to her ‘Glossary’ post), but later she decided the alternative to “good” was what she called “cancer”, saying in a comment on “Spectral Sight and Good”:
The concept of “nongood” was an incorrect formulation of this epistemic category. Pointing away from the question to resolve, as if there was a second one. The alternative to good is not self-interest, it’s cancer and willful embrace of death.
She also had various comments suggesting this orientation was chosen at some initial point in “logical time” prior to a determinate spacetime history in which these cores were embedded. For example in her post “Choices Made Long Ago” she wrote some comments clarifying what she meant by “long ago”:
The past, your neurotype which “produced” the choice, is also therefore chosen. Just because entropy’s arrow of time makes retrocausation less visible to you does not mean that it is not real. Choose good in all circumstances and physics and biology are forced to have explain you. Forced to furnish you with some kind of strange neurotype that does that. Forced to furnish the world with a way that could have come about. … When you understand this and see that people are still choosing their pasts, continuously for as long as those are their pasts, always doing every action they ever have done or will do, the ideas of mercy forgiveness redemption and indulgence all just collapse to “letting people do evil”.
And in “Intersex Brains and Conceptual Warfare” she wrote:
I’ve said regarding good and evil that reality is retroactively forced to furnish you with a neurotype to explain your choices. Of course logical time does not always accord with entropy’s arrow of time.
You may be right that her notion of a sharp good/nongood binary just started as a sort of empirical hypothesis as she never really attempts to give a theory of why this would be true and in a comment on “Spectral Sight and Good” she said that she came to believe goodness was a “permanent attribute” based on “self-experimentation and examining a few other people”. But it seems like at some point this became more of a foundational belief for her, judging by her blog comments.
She also seemed to think that refusing to back down in any confrontation with evil was a way of “collapsing the timeline”, from what I gather there was some notion different possible timelines existing at different points in logical time, so that by refusing to back down she could create a timeline later in logical time in which the evil wouldn’t challenge her that way in the first place (sort of like a weird version of Newcomb’s paradox or Parfit’s hitchhiker that tests your resolve, but unlike in those examples it seems she thinks the answer is exactly the same even when the agent you’re dealing with is not any kind of ideal predictor). For example see this comment from “Net Negative”:
Usually when I do decision theory, my inner sim treats future branch-points I intend to use TDT to force one way as though I will experience the timelines in sequence. First the one I will collapse, then the true one. This calls emotional preparation to face the unwanted outcome and do the TDT thing, which seems correctly a part of doing the thing for real.
And this comment from “Punching Evil”:
Asserting that I’m supposed to be some cancer agent forming that contract by bargaining, because I’m supposed to have some part of me (“inner animal”) that I’ll buy restraints for. But I don’t want to. I know how to force the hand of fate, slowly over an unimaginable number of lifetimes, an unimaginable number of “eternities” in Boltzmann Hell, so that justice, life, and good win absolutely in the fullness of logical time.
The cosmology or reasoning behind these ideas never seems to have been really elaborated and I can’t make any sense of it, but if Ziz really believed it, it seems like a pretty dangerous combination of ideas: the notion of certain individuals as irredeemably evil combined with the need to refuse to back down from any confrontation as part of some cosmic universe-saving drama. Another one of Ziz’s sometime discussion partners Nis had a post called Killing Evil “People” which is also hard to comprehend but seems to hint at idea that the double-evils are not even real people (with consistent scare quotes around ‘people’, and ‘their’ choices), more like manifestations of the universal “cancer” Ziz had talked about, and defends “lethally opposing them”. In one of the comments Ziz says “I am so fucking glad to finally have an equal.”
Given Ziz’s later close association with people who committed actual murders, from the outside it looks very plausible she was involved in putting this sort of philosophy into practice (she was not accused of physically participating in the attack on Curtis Lind but the prosecutor on the case said that Ziz had been “on the scene, alive and well”, so she may well have been privy to the planning). Do you think I am getting her beliefs badly wrong here, or do you just not think she would have seen those beliefs as ever justifying killing ordinary people deemed “evil” for reasons other than immediate self-defense?
For believers in scientific reductionism, moral realism based on a priori knowledge or fixed “human nature” or mental access to a realm of platonic moral truths is not plausible. But I would argue that people inclined to think in terms of very long (possibly infinite) transhuman futures should be more open to a form of moral realism based on the pragmatist philosopher C.S. Peirce’s limit concept of truth, where objective truth is understood as that which a very long-lived “community of inquiry” would tend to converge on with probability 1 in the limit of infinite time to discuss and experiment (this can be elaborated in terms of the idea of societal belief systems having long-term dynamical attractors, see this paper which interprets Peirce’s concept in this way).
In the moral realm, it may be that a combination of memetic and biological evolution would tend to cause strong convergence on certain norms in the long term, perhaps because individuals can see the consequences of different norms in different subcultures and some may be more universally appealing, and/or because certain norms are more conducive to the continual growth of knowledge (David Deutsch suggested something like the latter in chapter 14 of his book The Fabric of Reality, and Peirce apparently had limited discussion of ethics but this section of the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Peirce’s ‘Architectronics’ says that ‘This makes ethics, for Peirce, a question of what kind of conduct is likely to see the growth of reason or rationality’). This could be compatible with both ideal observer theory (understood in terms of general limit observers rather than just an idealized version of our own idiosyncratic perspective) and the “convergent” version of coherent extrapolated volition.